High-Rise

It is an allegory, kind of, of pre-Thatcherite Britain: the toffs at the top of the tower block, the plebs at the bottom.

He moves in, this fellow called Laing (Tom Hiddleston, James Bond-elect), his name an allusion no doubt to the cult psychiatrist, and he tries to move up, but social mobility is as dodgy as the power supply and the rubbish disposal system. (Don’t block the chute!) This is the winter of discontent.

Anyway, there is a suspicious death and various social machinations and it is all very dark and dystopian and disenchanted.

Why make this film now, you may well ask, unless it looks forward as well as back? Indeed, the film seems to paint the future for Britain should we leave the EU, as some establishment figure will no doubt pipe up and pronounce shortly. And it proffers the same advice as the now little read and sadly under appreciated Hillaire Belloc: